If you’ve studied homeopathy for any length of time, you have come across the term “Vital Force.” What is the vital force? Why should you care? Is it New Age and from the occult?
When I first started studying homeopathy, I kept reading about the vital force. That if one has a weakened vital force then they were prone to sickness. I really didn’t understand the term “vital force.” It sounded strange to me. I read Hahnemann’s book, The Organon of the Medical Art and it didn’t really explain it well, at least not to my satisfaction. I read Lectures in Homeopathic Philosophy by James Kent. Also, not helpful in discovering what this force was.
That Sounds Weird
In my mind, it sounded a lot like Star Wars. This force inside us connects us and lets us confuse people about droids. Um, no thanks. It sounded like a New Age philosophy that we have this connection and ability to channel things….I don’t actually know much about New Age philosophies, but as a Christian, I know enough to know that’s not anything I want to be a part of.
As a Christian, I worried that homeopathy was part of the occult…like witchcraft. If you search the term “vital force” on the Internet, you will find a lot of definitions that actually do border on the occult.
I Was Partly Right
I ended up thinking of it as simply our immune system. After all, in Samuel Hahnemann’s time, they didn’t have an understanding of our immune system and how it works. It then made sense to me that the “vital force” was a person’s immune system. Hahnemann and other homeopaths would speak of strengthening our vital force and not using too high of potencies in someone with a weak vital force. That homeopathic remedies could “close holes” in the vital force. Replacing the term “immune system” there fits just as well.
So, for 18 years that’s how I’ve looked at it. When I would hear vital force, my brain replaced it with the term immune system. But I was wrong.
So Much More
The Vital Force is so much more than just our immune system! It is not just our physical health, but our mental and emotional health as well—these three aspects of our health need to be balanced and healthy. If one is out of whack, the other two don’t function as well either. I do not believe it to be the center of our energy. It is not a force that connects to each other and the world. I believe it to be the person as a whole.
(Here my Baptist preacher husband and I had a discussion. He says that I can’t call it the “whole person” without including spiritual health. I agree. That when we think of a whole person we must include their spiritual health. Knowing Christ and spending time in The Word provide so much healing to the heart and soul. He is the ultimate healer. However, homeopathy can’t heal your soul. That is the work of the Holy Spirit alone.)
For example, a few weeks ago, my family was hit with the dreaded stomach bug. While hard to watch the children suffer with this, I was able to keep my cool and still function. Until my daughter got it. She has Down Syndrome, and autism, and is non-verbal. By far my hardest to treat homeopathically because she can’t tell me how she’s feeling! She spent 3 hours screaming at me while vomiting and having uncontrollable diarrhea. She was having stomach cramps, but couldn’t verbalize the pain, hence the screaming. I was so stressed out, I just kept crying the whole time. As soon as the remedies started to work and she started feeling some relief, I started to feel nauseous.
I had been dealing with sick children all week. Never once felt tired or under the weather. But the intensity of the previous few hours was enough to weaken my immune system so that I was the next to fall. She had a restless night and my husband took care of her. No more vomiting or stomach cramps. I used the remedies Arsenicum and Veratrum to help her if you’re curious.
I Can See It
By using the understanding that our vital force is our mental health, emotional health as well as our physical health, I can now see how we can have “holes” in our vital force that need to be dealt with. Many years ago my best friend had an extreme loss. Several years later she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her doctor told her that the emotions of the grief depressed her immune system and allowed the cancer to grow unchecked.
By seeing that her emotional health was out of balance and affected her physical health, we can see the holes that were created and weakened her vital force. Her oncologist told her that we all have random cells that develop abnormally, but that our immune system normally deals with them as it should. Hence creating a hole in what we call her vital force.
This concept also helps us to see why potency would matter in regard to a person’s vital force. We would never give a frail 90-year-old woman a 1M potency. Why? Her physical health would not respond well. She would need a more gentle approach. Just as giving a robust 30-year-old man who has suffered a devasting financial crisis a 1M could be a bad idea. His mental and emotional health would also need a more gentle approach. Granted, the younger man would recover faster and be able to move up to a 1M, if that is what the treatment required. These are just hypothetical examples, of course.
Nothing to Fear
I don’t know if other Christians have struggled with the concept of what the vital force is and how we should view it. If you have, I hope I have helped make it understandable. We are fearfully and wonderfully made by the Lord Almighty.
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